Jake Wharton

py-videodownloader is a python script which allows for the downloading of videos from the major online providers of streaming video. Currently it supports only YouTube and Vimeo but is modularized so adding other services is fairly simple. It is based off of the py-youtube-downloader script written by chexov.

To use, run the script with a target provider and the video ID you wish to download:

$ ./video-downloader.py -p Vimeo 5720832
$ ./video-downloader.py -p YouTube tgbNymZ7vqY

The above two commands will download one video from both Vimeo and YouTube. Since both videos are available in HD we can pass the respective arguments to download the Vimeo video in 720 and the YouTube video in 1080p:

$ ./video-downloader.py -p Vimeo -f hd 5720832
$ ./video-downloader.py -p YouTube -f 37 tgbNymZ7vqY

You may optionally pass an output directory with the -d or --directory argument. For a list of formats for a specified provider run the command without any video IDs:

$ ./video-downloader.py -p YouTube
video-downloader-1.1.0 - by Jake Wharton <jakewharton@gmail.com>

Format     Description
---------- ----------------------------------------
13         176x144 3GP/AMR Mono 3GP
17         176x144 3GP/AAC Mono 3GP
22         1280x720 H.264/AAC Stereo MP4
18         480x360/480x270 H.264/AAC Stereo MP4
37         1920x1080 H.264/AAC Stereo MP4
35         640x480/640x360 H.264/AAC Stereo FLV
34         320x240 H.264/AAC Stereo FLV
5          320x240 H.263/MP3 Mono FLV
6          320x240 H.263/MP3 Mono FLV

The source code for the script as well as download links are available via the GitHub project page.

In developing websites I would often find myself committing to its git repository, pushing to GitHub, and then SSH-ing to the web host and manually triggering a pull. While being very tedious it sufficed to get the job done. For months I had vowed to employ GitHub’s post-receive hooks to automatically pull in changes on the deployment location. Well, I finally got around to it: http://gist.github.com/228427

Deploying this is as easy as putting this in hookpuller.py, updating the branches dictionary, running chmod 770 hookpuller.py, and protecting it with simple authentication credentials.

Then in your GitHub project go to the “Service Hooks” sub-page under the “Admin” section and enter the URL to the script.

Now whenever you push to GitHub your changes will be instantly pulled onto your deployment server.

Checking an encode for DXVA compliance or the much more strict Awesome compliance has involved checking the MediaInfo output for up to 16 different settings. While most encoders understand these settings, a lot of end-users and potential uploaders do not. It is for this reason that I have created a pyy-based web application which automatically parses MediaInfo outputs and checks all these rules.

You can find the working version of it running at http://awesome.jakewharton.com/. Simply paste the text output from MediaInfo of any media file which you wish to check against DXVA or Awesome rules and submit. It will show you a green box if it is compliant and a red box if it is not. It will also list all the settings which violate the rules at the bottom.

As with most of my projects, the source is available on GitHub here and any contribution is welcome.

Update: JSON and XML requests can now be served via http://awesome.jakewharton.com/json/ and http://awesome.jakewharton.com/xml/, respectively. The MediaInfo text should be POSTed in ‘mediainfo’ and include ‘is_animation’ to denote the encode is animated. You can view example responses here.

The use of 3^rd party packages (i.e. through git submodules) you might run into an instance where a package requires a library that is not installed. If you use a 3^rd party hosting solution and cannot modify your main installation there is an easy trick to aid in making these missing libraries importable.
Continue reading…